Criticism
A professor of Kabbalah at Hebrew University of Jerusalem has bemoaned the hijacking of kabba'lah by various New Age authors and has given Halevi as an example. Joseph Dan, in his work The Heart and the Fountain: An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experiences, writes in footnote 57 to the introduction:
- Another distressing phenomenon is connected with the numerous books concerning kabbalah, its history, nature, and traditions, as instruction for modern living, published by "Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi" who is a nice English gentleman from Hampstead who does not know any Hebrew. His books were used as authentic, scholarly source by many, including Simo Parpola.
In 'Authorized Guardians' in Polemical Encounters (Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (ed.), Leiden:Brill, 2007; p. 89) Prof. Boaz Huss at Ben-Gurion university points at the fact that the criticism launched at Halevi does appear in the chapter 'The christian kabbalah'. These and other attempts can be viewed as 'boundary-constructing discourse' and 'othering of the enemy', depicting him as 'debased' or 'degenerated' in order to annihilate him (cp. Huss in Hammer/Von Stuckrad, 2007, xiii). Halevi lives in the London borough of Brent.
Read more about this topic: Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)